A little but on the weak side with skills that either have no range or only target one enemy.

The fact that a close combat character requires INT scaling means they aren't often going to be doing much damage, even with points into warfare sadly.

Still, a neat take on monk regardless.

I figured it out,

Hello, this is my first mod for this game. I downloaded it and started a new game, but I do not see this preset when I do custom character. What should I do?

Thanks, Snick

Any chance you could make finesse scaling staff option? I'm wanting to use this mod alongside the monk class from feenex's battlepack. Having Int scaling staff along side warfare and scoundrel scaling skills makes building weird

If this mod affect other monk classes or no?

Love the mod, but i'm wondering if you have any plans to add any unarmed options... maybe invisible fist weapons?

The Monk staves are treated as a separate weapon type, so they won't be affected.

i'm using a mod that makes magic staffs attack at range, will your monk staffs be affected by this or work normally?

Thank you! Sorry for the late reply. The damage build we were talking about relies on using Mantis Style in conjunction with other crit-boosting abilities to exceed 100% crit, then hitting Mantis Strike to reduce target's physical resistances and then following it up with something like Flurry of Blows for 5 crits to delete an enemy. Like a lot of the potential builds with this class, it takes time to ramp up, but when it comes online you can deal outrageous damage.

I believe you unlock the hybrid stances at level 9, though I could be off; it's been a while since I revisited this unfortunately.

I love this mod, thank you! Any tips on how to do the damage build that you and Downpick were talking about? Also, when do you unlock the hybrid forms? I have an Airbender-esque idea utilizing Odinblades Aerothurge mod with Windweaver skills. Basically wip around the battlefield with wind abilities to get in and attack in Mantis Style.

My only critique is that I wish it didn't cost chi to enter a form, but the form ability cost chi. It's a little tedious to run all the way to an opponent and attack them just to enter your first form.

The monk's abilities actually all scale with the stat of their equipped weapon (a la warfare skills), and have a requirement of using a staff, meaning monks are (by design) locked into an intelligence build, as there are a lot of strong defensive abilities included with this class, and light/no armor is a staple of the various Monks I built this after. I can potentially do a less-restrictive patch for those unconcerned with overtuning, but it'll likely be some time because I do not currently have access to my original mod files. I'd also like to fix the first vendor's dialogue, and fix one ability that's accidentally scaling with strength.

Reading through the comment history I saw a mention that you may do an update or rework that would change the class to work with other weapons, like the Spear. Any plans to still do this? It feels like it would make more sense for a monk to be a Finesse based class over one that needs to points into Intellect to use Staves AND Strength for their abilities when you could have made the skills work with finesse and allow them to use Spears. That's just my input and opinion though.

It currently works with any staff, including the base staves in the game, but not strength/agi scaling 2handers. The Monk vendors sell physical damage staves with the Ki Strike ability, but you can fully build a more magic-oriented monk with a regular staff. There's a hybrid stance for every magic school (except summoning).

Love the mod! Do you have plans of making this work with any 2H/staff in the game or can we only get them from mod merchants? Thanks!

@Aebleskiver You can only activate a Style when you have Ki, which is generated using the Monk's offensive abilities. Also you need to have a staff equipped.

I have no Idea why but it won't let me cast Styles on self. Says invalid target. I've also tried just having this mod and nothing else enabled it still won't work. Anyone else having this issue?

@Brum Thank you. I'm about to try out the MOD. I am super excited.

@FatMarlow There are two staves, one in Act 1 and one in Act 2. The first staff was owned by an Elven Sourcerer, and the other by a Dwarven Master.

Does anyone know all the location of the hidden staves?

Nevermind, the Drunken monk is easy to find at the Driftwood tavern (just right of the wannabe elf magister), it's the mod "joyless beginnings" that messed up the merchants appearing correctly.

Hello all, I can't find the vendor in Driftwood, anywhere around the Tavern. I've got the Highlight and Circle options enabled for all characters, but still can't find the vendor. Can anyone give me a specific location outside the Tavern, and the name of the Monk skill vendor?

I'm also using the "Joyless Beginnings" to skip act 1 (for various reasons), I hope that doesn't impact this mod.

Breath of Flames scales with strength not intellegence, I'm not sure if this is intentional or not. Btw, great mod, best one about monks out there

Anyone get ??? on the abilities?

Anyone got spoilers for the unique staff locations? They are overtuned for their level, so I want them always, and idk if they are as "on the way" and easy to stumble into in act3/4 as they are in 1/2

Is there a way to get a version of this without Staves? Purely fists?

Lol, thanks! Not sure how my companions will feel about that though, heh.

Sever - pro tip, you can hit another of your toons with Ki Strike before combat to generate Ki to let you enter any stance before combat. fun times.

Hi again! I think allowing the stances to last indefinitely would be better. The monk could be in a stance to start every combat but still have to spend ki to switch stances. Maybe that would be too OP? Thanks again!

Using SS with an air staff would be treated the same as using something like the Warfare Crippling Blow, where it applies your weapon damage. So unless your staff has the "applies shocked" effect then you should be fine.

Thanks for your mod!

Doesn't SS deal air damage if the monk is using a staff with air damage? Maybe I'm not understanding the game mechanics, but I thought that, for instance, if you dealt air damage in melee to a target while they were standing in water you would become shocked (or stunned) if you were already shocked. I was thinking something like that might happen using SS.

I can't see why your character would get CC'd, scorpion strike is just a standard attack.

Hi! So, with say, Scorpion Strike, if my character uses it and happens to have an air/electric debuff (forgot the name..."shocked"?), will my character become stunned?

Your mod looks really cool, but I would hate to be cc'ing my own characters, heh

Hey, thanks so much for the feedback. The Arx vendor should be just inside the market near the wagon that sits in town square. Male Dwarf. I'm interested to hear about Mantis, it's something that nobody else has really brought up. For your crit-centric build, Mantis definitely seems to be the best option, but that's kind of my intention is to have a variety of stances to suit a variety of builds, as well as to allow for a jack-of-all trades stance switcher. A lot of the stances are defense-focused, as the main build I personally had fun with was playing a tank/bruiser monk with a lot of options for how to soak damage. After playing a bit with it, Mantis definitely does seem to be really strong for a pure dps though. (Also the Boar damage buff stacks with Challenge/thick of the fight so that stance is absolutely insane for potential burst damage.)

Also:

I still don't seem to get much value out of stance switching - it's easier just to melee everything right away after entering Mantis. At lvl 20 I have around 88% crit before Mantis, and Mantis seems to put me at 118% after the wits and crit boost. The other stances (Boar, Turtle) don't seem to add as much value - the 20% damage bonus from Boar is easily made up by using Challenge at the start of a fight, for instance. Turtle's armor boosts probably should be higher or Mantis' crit-chance boost should be turned down, I guess. I have been playing purely physical damage, so I can't say whether the magic school boosts are worth it or not. The aero boost one seems to only give me +3 aero so perhaps they're not really worth it for a hybrid build.

Anyway, it's been a fun run, so thanks again for the mod and the creativity behind it!

Brum, just an update: the new ToD is pretty cool, though the explosion seems to damage yourself too (but that's OK). The melee attacks hit hard, that's for sure. I took out Kalon and his groupies in the sewers in one round with Flurry of Blows and Leg Sweep, I think. Leg Sweep seems to do about 2x the damage of ToD (not counting explosion) and hit in a big arc, and doesn't have a source point cost, so that's something to think about when tweaking ToD, I guess.

Can you clarify where the Monk vendor is in Arx? I looked around the market areas and couldn't find him/her. I've been using the same Staff since Fort Joy (upgrading it) and I wanted to see if the vendor had any new ones.

The ki strike from the staff is doing about 30 less damage than listed at the early levels.

The only thing I can think of is there must be some kind of incompatibility with another mod. I'm not sure what that would be, but moving it up in mod order would probably help if anything.

ive done some testing and its not the way its listed, maybe it just doesnt like the other mods

yeah he does, i was wondering if it needed to be loaded or first or last? idk haha

@Downpick Yeah I changed ToD to deal half of your staff's damage in piercing. As for dodging, I increased the dodge chance on Ki to 15% and made Monk staves grant 5% passively. I could improve the defensive stances a bit to incentivize switching into, say, turtle to always gain that bonus armor, or drunken master to gain health. A more interesting alternative could he increasing Diamond Body's duration to 2 turns, making it more core in a Monk's defensive rotation.

@Clysma Does the other player also have the mod installed?

ive tried multiple times but every time i try to play multiplayer with this mod, the other persons abilities get super glitched and they crash, this only happens when monk mod is on

Regarding dodge being the class mechanic for phys damage, i don't see it. I'm constantly using my Ki (when I get it first) to enter Mantis Stance for the wits and crit-chance boost, and while the other powers may give more Ki, at least as it stands it doesn't add enough dodge to be interesting. Dodge is a wonky mechanic anyway, IMHO, as it does nothing to negate spell damage and unless you're near 100% it's kind of useless to rely on. You can put 2 points into Aero and get Uncanny Evasion, too, pretty easily. The Duelist mod is to some degree built around Dodge but he put more % into the base skills, so maybe if you could have Ki stack 20% dodge chances every time you use a Ki-generating power? And then have some ultimate power that lets you burn that Ki for damage, so you could choose to give up your multiple stacks of dodge/Ki or not?

It looks like you updated Touch of Death as it's now showing a tool tip for me of ~750-800 piercing damage. Marginally more interesting. I'm still finding it very situational, but I will try to work it more into my rotation to test. Cool.

Ah, it might have something to do with the pure damage that causes it to be a spell. I'll look into it. So Touch of Death deals a small amount of pure damage, and immediately executes the target or their health falls below 25%. If they die, all enemies near the target (I forget the range offhand but I think it's around 6-8m) are subject to the same damage + execute attempt. It was definitely the most complex skill to build so I'm glad someone is digging into it a bit. The light armor was my intention, as I wanted physical armor to be a weak point of the class. Do you think increasing the dodge chance of Ki to 20% would suffice to increase survivability? I definitely want dodge to be how the class handles physical damage, without being too impossible to hit.

Also Touch of Death seems to be coded as a spell, so it can't be used when you're Enraged. Enrage + Relentless Pursuit = fun times.

@Brum, OK, ref Touch of Death - is the idea that it will execute the target if the target is below 25%, and then the exectued target explodes and kills any mobs around it that were also under 25%? Just trying to figure out how it works. FYI, the Relentless Pursuit power is cool and reminds me of Whispers of the Wind in POE2.

What I'm noticing so far is that the Int requirement for staves is forcing me into Int armor which doesn't have enough physical armor to handle being in melee very well. Need to think about stat tradeoffs. Also movement skills become key to making the build work. Interesting so far.

Also yeah I'll probably put out a conversion that just removes the staff requirement, which would make it the damage just scale with whichever type of weapon you're using, spear included.

Not sure what's up with blackout strike, I'll look into it. Touch of Death is intentionally low damage, because it's pure damage and also executes the target and all nearby targets below 25% health. If it did a lot if damage on top of that it would definitely be too strong.